Even as the extended deadline of February 15 for bringing people hitherto left out of the National Food Security Act (NFSA) among the beneficiaries’ list is about to end in less than two weeks’ time, the Food and Civil Supplies department asserted that the work will be comfortably accomplished by the deadline and the coverage will reach States’ average stipulated by the Act.
A team of seven senior officials from the rank of Special Secretary to Deputy Secretary is on a state-wide visit to collect up-to-date information about the number of fresh applications collected in each district and also to ascertain compliance to the directives of the department besides, the functioning of public-distribution-system. Notably, the department has to enrol around 2.64-crore people in the largest scheme on this planet to end hunger and provide food grains under the quota fixed by the central government.
“Right now around 2.33-crore beneficiaries have been covered under the Act and we are confident that the remaining 31-lakh would be included in the list by February 15,” said Special Secretary of Food and Civil Supplies, Ravi Ranjan who was on a fact finding mission to Bokaro at the time of writing the report.
The Special Secretary added that despite reaching the target, benefits could not be given to the newly inducted beneficiaries until the applications are digitised. The central government releases food grain quota based on the number of digitised records. Ranjan confided that the digitisation of remaining
31-lakh would be completed by March and flow of food grain to the new batch of beneficiaries will tentatively start from April.
Although the officials are confident about linking 31-lakh left out beneficiaries to the NDA flagship scheme, exact number of fresh applications claiming the entitlement to food grains will become clear by February 8.
“We are still collecting up-to-date information about the number of fresh applications submitted by beneficiaries. The exact number of applications received so far will be clear by Monday next week,” added Joint Secretary of the department, Basant Kumar Das.
Meanwhile, social activists of ‘Right to Food Movement’ discovered several loopholes in the scheme. Notable among them included less coverage in some pockets of Manika block in lohardaga than the mandatory state average for rural areas, missing name of a beneficiary in each household in the same block, fake cards and duplicate names.
Social activist Jean Dreze, associated with the forum, expressed that the survey conducted by the forum exposed cheating by dealers and found that less food grain than the NFSA entitlement.
Significantly, the department is battling with removing undeserving entries from the list and as per the official figure around 20 per cent of the 1.44-lakh entries have been removed from the NFSA beneficiary database.